During outages of power provided to cell sites by a commercial power utility (e.g., via a utility grid), a telecommunications network provider may deploy generators to affected sites, in order to provide supplemental or temporary power to the sites during the outages. This temporary provision of power, via the deployed generators, enables the network provider to maintain normal operations of the cell sites during the outages to the utility, which benefits customers of the network provider who utilize network provided services like voice, text, and/or data communications via associated mobile devices (e.g., smart phones, tablets, laptops, and so on).
Typically, the network provider, via their emergency operations center (EOC), sends field technicians to the generator-powered cell sites to identify or confirm sites where commercial power has been restored. For example, after a large outage (e.g., an outage affecting a large area with many cell sites), the EOC may send out large numbers of technicians over many work shifts to deploy generators and identify when sites have been restored. Thus, a generator at a cell site may operate for many hours after power to the cell site has been restored and before a technician arrives to determine power from the utility grid has been restored and to shut off the generator. Such an arrangement has various drawbacks, such as costs associated with wasted fuel at unneeded generators, costs associated with technician time to travel and inspect cell sites, and so on.
The drawings have not necessarily been drawn to scale. Similarly, some components and/or operations may be separated into different blocks or combined into a single block for the purposes of discussion of some of the embodiments of the present technology. Moreover, while the technology is amenable to various modifications and alternative forms, specific embodiments have been shown by way of example in the drawings and are described in detail below. The intention, however, is not to limit the technology to the particular embodiments described. On the contrary, the technology is intended to cover all modifications, equivalents, and alternatives falling within the scope of the technology as defined by the appended claims.